Devra Davis
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 In modern human populations studied so far, the proportion of males born relative to females in a healthy human population is .515. This can also be presented as the sex ratio of males to females of 1.06. For the past three decades in many industrial countries, this number is declining by very small amounts. Today there are nearly 4 million births in a single year in the United States. Since 1970, the proportion of baby boys born has fallen by just one out of every thousand births. |
David R. Montgomery
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 Extensive Bronze Age soil erosion coincides with changing agricultural practices that allowed a major increase in human population. The transition from highly localized, spring-fed agriculture using digging sticks to rain-fed agriculture based on clearing and plowing whole landscapes fueled an expansion of settlements. Initially, very low hillslope erosion rates increased slowly as agriculture spread until eventually erosion increased tenfold during the Bronze Age. |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
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 Radiocarbon dating from archaeological sites provides clear evidence that the human population in Northern
Europe went into a steep decline, showing a steep drop-off in settlements and other human activity.
But humans clearly survived; the question is, how? Certainly some of our success was due to social adaptation—many scientists think that the Younger Dryas helped to spur the collapse of hunter-gatherer societies and the first development of agriculture. But what about biological adaptation and natural selection? |
Bill Sardi
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 Tub ercuiosis
With such a vast percentage of Earth's human population infected with pulmonary (lung) tuberculosis (nearly 2 billion out of 6 billion humans), and possibly billions more infected with latent TB (asymptomatic or showing no symptoms) and
Family of Tubercular Mycobacteria
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
—? Cause of tuberculosis in humans
Mycobacterium bovis
—? Cause of tuberculosis in cattle
Mycobacterium avium
—? Cause of tuberculosis in birds
Mycobacterium paratuberculosis
—? |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
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| In fact, genetic testing is revealing that the human population as a whole is already far more mixed than most people assume. Take Dr. Henry Louis Gates, for example, the distinguished scholar who is the chair of African and African American Studies at Harvard. Dr. Gates is black, but he and his family have long believed that they had at least one distant ancestor who wasn't black. Most likely a former slave owner who was thought to have been involved with his great-great-grandmother. And then some genetic testing revealed that Dr. |
John J. Ratey, MD
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 One of the best examples is a landmark research project from the human population Laboratory in Berkeley called the Alameda County Study. Researchers tracked 8,023 people for twenty-six years, surveying them about a number of factors related to lifestyle habits and healthiness starting in 1965. They checked back in with the participants in 1974 and in 1983. Of all the people with no signs of depression at the beginning, those who became inactive over the next nine years were 1.5 times more likely to have depression by 1983 than their active counterparts. |
David R. Montgomery
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| Between 1930 and 1970, the number of grazing animals doubled; the human population tripled. New French plantations to grow cotton and peanuts as cash crops pushed subsistence farmers onto smaller areas of marginal land. Fallow periods were reduced or eliminated and crop yields began to fall. Ground exposed beneath parched crops dried out and blew away with the wind.
Then in 1972, no rain fell and no grass grew. Livestock mortality was high where continuous overgrazing left little grass from the previous year. The few fruit trees that survived bore little fruit. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Whether you believe that the plan to destroy the nutritional value of the food supply is due to widespread incompetence or some evil plot to reduce the human population by nutritionally starving the masses, one thing remains inarguably true: Each year, more and more of your food is getting irradiated, pasteurized, homogenized, milled, processed, steam treated, dipped, bleached or otherwise altered. |
David R. Montgomery
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| Did a growing human population drive up demand for agricultural producrs? Or did increased agricultural production enable faster population growth? Regardless of how we view the causality, the two rose in tandem.
Nonetheless, as the population grew, the European diet declined. With almost all of the available land in cultivation, Europeans increasingly survived on vegetables, gruel, and bread. Without surplus grain to feed animals through the winter, and later without access to the commons to graze cattle, eating meat became an uppet-class privilege. |
Lester A. Mitscher and Victoria Toews
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 Researchers from the National Cancer Institute in the United States and the Shanghai Cancer Institute in China teamed up in 1994 to use epidemiological methods to investigate the effects of green tea in a human population. A cancer registry in China identified 902 esophageal cancer patients, and another 1,552 cancer-free men and women were included in the study as controls. |
David R. Montgomery
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| They were so successful that by about 5000 bc the human population occupied virtually the entire area of the Middle East suitable for dryland farming. The pressure to produce more food intensified because population growth kept pace with increasing food production. This, in turn, increased pressure to extract more food from the land. Not long after the first communities settled into an agricultural lifestyle, the impact of top-soil erosion and degraded soil fertility—caused by intensive agriculture and goat grazing—began to undermine crop yields. |
| Instead the human population swelled to the point where there are more hungry people alive today than ever before.
In addition to being natural fertilizers, nitrates are essential for making explosives. By the early twentieth century, industrial nations were becoming increasingly dependent on nitrates to feed their people and weapons. Britain and Germany in particular were aggressively seeking reliable sources of nitrates. Both countries had little additional cultivatable land and already imported large amounts of grain, despite relatively high crop yields from their own fields. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 When the next pandemic really does strike, we may lose 10 percent of the human population while drug companies bicker over who owns the patents on the medicines to save whoever's still left standing. I honestly believe that most drug companies would rather see millions of people die from disease than have to give up their patents and profits. The drug business is a for-profit business, and there's simply no profit in doing what's right for the community at large. There's only profit in the exploitation, ownership and control of genes, drugs and vaccines. |
Dr. Abram Hoffer, MD, FRCP (C) and Dr. Harold D. Foster, PhD
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 Any genetic aberration promoting such a deficiency state, if it was to diffuse widely in the human population, must have carried with it some enormous counterbalancing advantage. If it did not, it would soon have disappeared from the human gene pool. What, then, are the advantages of the apparent inadequate synthesis of niacin?
Adrenochrome Trade-Off
Since high levels of niacin are so beneficial, how could it be advantageous to lose most of our ability to synthesize it? |
| The Case of Sickle Cell Anemia
The question remains, "Why would a genetic aberration that lowers niacin production in the body and results in so many diseases or disorders become so widespread among the human population?" Perhaps the answer can be obtained by studying sickle cell anemia. Roughly one out of every 400 Afro-Americans develops sickle cell anemia. In those with this chronic hereditary disease, many of their red blood cells form rigid crescent or sickle shapes that cannot pass through capillaries. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It makes us less humane and is an uncivilized way to use the resources of the planet to support the human population, whereas consuming and surviving on plants is an evolved and intelligent way to feed the planet. If you consume mostly raw foods, then you also get outstanding nutrition. Cooking food destroys much of its nutritional content -- not only the proteins, but also the vitamins and the phytonutrients that make plants such a potent nutrition source in the first place. |
David R. Montgomery
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| Billions of microscopic bugs can live in a handful of topsoil; those in a pound of fertile dirt outnumber Earth's human population. That's hard to imagine when you're packed into the Tokyo subway or trying to make your way down the streets of Calcutta or New York City. Yet our reality is built on, and in many ways depends upon, the invisible world of microbes that accelerate the release of nutrients and decay of organic matter, making the land hospitable for plants and therefore people. |
Mark Lynas
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 With ecosystems already fragmented and marginalised due to incessant human population growth and economic activity, climate change looks set to reap a grim toll on what remains of nature.
Threats to some emblematic species, like the pikas, were mentioned in the previous chapter, as were especially vulnerable ecosystems like coral reefs and the Queensland Wet Tropics rainforest. All will be suffering further serious reductions in the two-degree world. South Africa's majestic pro tea flowers will be losing much of their range, and 10 per cent could be extinct by 2050. |
| Never before has the human population had to leave an entire latitudinal belt across the whole width of the globe.
Conflicts will inevitably erupt as these numerous climate refugees spill into already densely populated areas. For example, millions could be forced to leave their lands in drought-struck Central American countries and trek north to Mexico and the United States. Tens of millions more will flee north from Africa towards Europe, where a warm welcome is unlikely to await them - new fascist parties may make sweeping electoral gains by promising to keep the starving African hordes out. |
| Over half a million square kilometres - an area the size of France - has been deforested, and more is chopped down each year to make way for cattle ranching and soya plantations. The human population encroaching on the forest has increased tenfold in the last half-century, and each new road the Brazilian government forges into pristine areas is quickly surrounded by new 'herringbone' patterns of deforestation. |
Ron Garner
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 It gives us a great deal of insight into the increase of degenerative diseases, and the decreases in fertility, in our human population.
Conclusions from these studies
Almost all we need to know about why disease conditions can develop is contained in the results of the Pottenger Cats Experiments:
Cooking destroys the life-giving, and life-sustaining, properties of food. Enzymes are destroyed, and the viability of certain acids is seriously reduced. ţDisease conditions result, over time, from eating a diet of mostly cooked and processed food. |
Mark Lynas
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| Humans were nearly wiped out in the ensuing 'nuclear' winter: the entire global human population crashed to somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 individuals, a genetic bottleneck which is still written in the genes of every human alive today. By implication, if six degrees of cooling was enough to nearly wipe us out in the past, might six degrees of warming have a similar effect in the future? That is the question this book seeks to answer. |
Alex Vilenkin
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 This situation is analogous to that of the human population of the Earth. Each person starts as a baby and grows older with time, but the entire population includes people of all ages at any given moment. Although the total volume of the universe grows with time, the fraction of space occupied by each type of island does not change. In this sense, the eternally inflating universe is stationary.
A striking feature of the new worldview is the existence of multiple "other worlds" beyond our observable region. Some of them are rather un-controversial. |
Ann M. Coulston and Carol J. Boushey
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 However, the possible benefits in a human population and the amounts of green tea necessary to produce beneficial effects remain to be determined.
B. Curcumin
One of the most exciting polyphenolic-containing dietary products that has emerged into the neuroscience literature in recent years is curcumin. Largely as a result of the groundbreaking work of Dr. Greg Cole and his colleagues [196], this spice, which has been used to treat illnesses for hundreds of years, has recently been shown to possess some putative important beneficial effects for neuroprotection and possible treatment in AD. |
| Human population biology and hypertension. Evolutionary and ecological aspects of blood pressure. In "Hypertension: Pathophysiology, Diagnosis and Management" (J. H. Laragh and B. M. Brenner, Eds.), pp. 137-145. Raven, New York.
7. Lowenstein, F. W. (1961). Blood-pressure in relation to age and sex in the tropics and subtropics. Lancet 1, 389-392.
8. Page, L. B., Damon, A., and Moellering, R. C. (1974). Antecedents of cardiovascular disease in six Solomon Islands societies. Circulation 49, 1132-1146.
9. Carvalho, J. J. M., et al. (1989). |
| The benefits and hazards of antioxidants: controlling apoptosis and other protective mechanisms in cancer patients and the human population. J. Am. Coll. Nutr. 20, 464S^172S.
32. Food and Drug Administration Office of Special Nutritionals. (1993). Conference on Antioxidant Vitamins and Cancer and Cardiovascular Disease, November 1-3. Food and Drug Administration, Washington, DC.
33. Seifried, H. E., McDonald, S. S., Anderson, D. E., Greenwald, P., and Milner, J. A. (2003). The antioxidant conundrum in cancer. Cancer Res. 63, 4295^1298.
34. Seifried, H. E., Anderson, D. E., Sorkin, B. |
Mark Lynas
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| But with human population growth projected to add still further to our ballooning numbers, the overall situation will become steadily more precarious as the world warms up. I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that millions, and later billions, of people will die in such a scenario. In Gaian terms, I suppose, the planet would be trying to restore a balance.
Unbelievably, perhaps, this still isn't quite the worst-case scenario. The next chapter will show how humanity's survival, even as a species, could be threatened by the ultimate apocalypse: six degrees of global warming. |
Michael Pollan
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 With widespread lipophobia taking hold of the human population, countless cattle lost their marbling and lean pork was repositioned as "the new white meat"—tasteless and tough as running shoes, perhaps, but now even a pork chop could compete with chicken as a way for eaters to "reduce saturated fat intake." In the years since then, egg producers figured out a clever way to redeem even the disreputable egg: By feeding flaxseed to hens, they could elevate levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the yolks. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This is the attitude of a majority of the human population today, and certainly it is the attitude of those who are in power, like those who run big corporations and governments. They say, "Nature is there for us to exploit." This is reflected in the intellectual property laws today, which say, in effect, that we own nature and that anything we happen to stumble across is from that point forward our "property. |
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